"Damaged Romanticism" features 15 internationally recognised contemporary artists whose work, in painting, sculpture, installations, and photography based media, belongs neither to a style nor a traditional 'school', but is thematically linked by a visual representation of how stubborn optimism, rather than utopianism, triumphs in the face of daily adversity. In her opening essay "Damaged Romanticism: A Mirror of Modern Emotion", Terrie Sultan offers an overview of the concept behind the exhibition and explains how the chosen works give form to contradictory sentiments of disillusionment, and defiance.David Pagel, in Romanticism's Aftermath, considers the role of Romanticism and Neoclassicism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and how 'damaged romanticism' is a reinterpretation of this. The links between art and film are further explored by Colin Gardner in the third essay, From here to eternity. Preceding the main catalogue is a short story by Nick Flynn, a crystal formed entirely of holes, a new work of fiction written especially for this exhibition.

Author Biography

Terrie Sultan, Director and Chief Curator of Blaffer Gallery; David Pagel, Assistant Professor of art theory and history at Claremont Graduate University, Los Angeles, CA and Adjunct Curator, Blaffer Gallery; Colin Gardner, Associate Professor in critical theory and interdisciplinary media at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Nick Flynn, Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston and author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City; Claudia Schmuckli, Adjunct Curator, Blaffer Gallery.